This motherboard is pricey ($250 street) and won't run the popular Crysis game (for an unknown reason, the system reports to some games that emulation is active) but offers plenty of succor to you newly impoverished, carnage-deprived geeks in Crysis crisisyour pockets may be empty, but your hearts will be filled with the thrill of strong performance. And the board's finger-friendly layout will let your grippers regroup from previous mobo installs.

The four built-in Draft 802.11n Wi-Fi ports support link aggregation, have good range, and perform brilliantly, so your (non-Crysis) frag-fests can even go wireless once you plug in the two included antennas. Impatient geeks who use host-controlled SATA drives in IDE mode and can't wait for boot-up to view pix, use Skype, and surf will love the ASUS Express Gate SSD that comes up before the POST runs.

Future-looking DDR3 memory sockets protect you against imminent retro-mobo syndrome but leave your pocketbook wide open to further plundering, since the board accepts no less-expensive types of memory. On the other hand, the wealth of value-added utilities, including a power-saving app and a Windows-based overclocker, will keep your thoughts off of how cold you are as you compute in your cardboard shack.

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Joel Durham Jr. has loved computers, technology, and gaming since he was a kid, first enjoying the wonders of the Atari 2600 and later indulging in the fabulous graphics of the Commodore 64. His lust for all things technical drove him to eventually seek employment: he landed a job at Computer Concepts, a Rochester-based PC consulting and repair firm, where the company president took Joel on as his apprentice. Within a year, Joel was running the service shop, installing networks for clients, and building systems...
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